I don’t know, and I’m completely OK with not knowing.
What happens when we die?
Question
What do you consider your greatest achievement?
Craft & work
Question
Which moment embarrassed you most?
Failure & regret
Question
What would you like to be remembered for?
Death & what remains
Question
What is the most important lesson life has taught you?
Time & hindsight
Question
What is the worst thing anyone has said to you?
Failure & regret
Question
When were you happiest?
Time & hindsight
Originally asked
The Guardian, to a different person each week, The Q&A
A recurring late-stage question in The Guardian Q&A, with materially different answers on publisher-hosted pages.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
I hope I’ll find my mother and father in heaven. Only my father would probably say, “You can’t come and live here, boy!”
The Q&A, The Guardian, 20 June 2026 source ↗
Others on this question
View all 53 →The worms get to feast.
Tony Judt
Historian and essayist
I don't believe in an afterlife. I don't believe in a single or multiple godhead. I respect people who do, but I don't believe it myself. But there's a big but which enters in here. I am much more conscious than I ever was, for obvious reasons, of what it will mean to people left behind once I'm dead. It won't mean anything for me. But it will mean a lot to them. ... So in one curious way I've come to believe in the afterlife as a place where I still have moral responsibilities, just as I do in this life except that I can only exercise them before I get there. Once I get there, it'll be too late.
Neil Gaiman
Author of fiction, comics and screenplays
I like the idea of being atoms that other people can breathe in, and fabulous worm food.
More from Frank Bowling
View profile →Being able to paint the way I do.
In the 1950s I went to the Chelsea Arts Club’s New Year’s Eve ball at the Royal Albert Hall dressed as a Christmas pudding, with swimming trunks under my costume and holly in my hair.
As a nice old man.
Keep working, improving your step.
A fellow artist called me a flaneur!
Recently, as people began to understand what I am trying to do in my painting.
More on death & what remains
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- How close have you come to death? 210 answers
- What song would you like played at your funeral? 179 answers
- If you had only one day left to live, how would you spend it — and what would you deliberately avoid doing? 54 answers
- What would you like to leave your children? 48 answers
- How would you like to die? 44 answers
Also answered this
Jon Snow, Esther Freud, Mark Radcliffe, Rosalind Eleazar, Nick Frost, Shobna Gulati
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